PAKISTAN-born Salman Amin was appointed CEO of grocery multinational pladis Global in late 2019, and had less than a year there under his belt before the cataclysm of the pandemic and lockdown hit the market.

Covid-19, however, left this graduate of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management unfazed, and pladis has seen its brands go from strength to strength during the 2020 emergency: it merely underlined Amin’s reputation as one of the most talented and capable brand experts around.

He is also one of the very few Asian-origin CEOs in the UK, although their numbers are growing steadily, as the GG2 Power List demonstrates with each passing year.

Amin’s particular talent is perhaps entwined with his life journey, which demonstrates several turns on the route to where he is today. It began in Lahore, where his family lived and where he went to school. “I was 17 years old,” he says. “I just finished my A-levels in Pakistan at the time and it was sort of expected that if I did reasonably well, it made sense to go abroad to study. So I went on to university in the United States, really to study engineering.”

So far, so straight-forward. Salman completed his degree and looked set on a conventional path – he was labouring in the field, or under the field to be more exact, wearing hi-vis and hard hat. “I was in Chicago, initially, literally down a hole with a giant boring machine in these tunnels under the city. And then, for me, there was a fork in the road: did I want to continue and do a master’s degree in engineering, or did I want to try something very different and broader?”

Even at that young age it was a rhetorical question. He knew he wanted to go